On keeping sketchbooks
I carry a sketchbook. I’ve been keeping a sketchbook since 2000. This weekend I stacked them all up to try to get a photo. It was more than I expected.
My sketchbook is basically attached to my person. If you’ve ever had an in-person meeting with me, my left arm probably looked like this:
As an art kid, I was always drawing and doodling. The corner convenience store I biked to as a kid had cheap blank notepads - I was always torn between spending my allowance on candy vs those sweet, shiny blank paper notepads.
My first real sketchbook in this stack was enforced by my Design I professor in college, Jon Swindell. Jon was the quintessential Art School Instructor: helpful but demanding, provocative when you needed him to be, kooky in ways that just delighted this suburban dumbass. An inspiration, truly.
When Professor Swindell told me designers should always carry a sketchbook, I believed him.
The second looked like this: I moved into decorating them with ephemera for a while. A bit of cosmic foreshadowing for my future job at a craft/scrapbooking supply company!
And now they all pretty much look like this.
Why keep a sketchbook?
So why do I keep a sketchbook? Really it’s more a notebook these days, but personally I process and remember stuff better in physical media. I also find that I get distracted in meetings, and I can pay better attention to things if my pen is moving.
But of course I’m a designer too - a lot of my work is planning and sketching, even if as Brand New Box has grown my job involves less design and more organizing.
Back in student days and first jobs they were all design and inspiration; my work back then was all about creativity and it was fun to make the pages look impressive, ca 2003:
Twenty years later, my sketchbooks are less pretty drawings, and a lot more operational notes. I still draw sometimes, though. But more likely the day’s pages are quick wireframes, to-do lists, and pages upon pages of meeting notes.
There are a LOT more pages like the left, not very many like the right.
(Yes, my handwriting is atrocious, yes I can read it, yes I apologize to all my grade school teachers who gave me Cs in Penmanship. You tried.)
But what’s it FOR?
Of course, a cute-looking page in a sketchbook is just 100% for ME; I don’t share them, it’s not work product that any of our BNB clients can use. To make it instrumental it needs to get out of the sketchbook and into the real world - a design in figma, or code, or an email, or a schedule, or a GitHub issue, etc. It’s an operational tool.
But it DOES help me actually THINK. Just like people say ‘writing is thinking’, drawing / sketching / and even note-taking is thinking for me as well. I can have a fuzzy idea in my head that seems basically correct, and then as soon as I try to instantiate it on paper I find all its shortcomings and half-baked-ness. Or opportunities to improve or connect that idea to other things!
Plus, I love the disconnectedness of a sketchbook. I can sit and think and plan in a sketchbook, and it doesn’t distract me from what I’m doing. The sketchbook cannot ping, buzz, email, slack, or tweet at me. That’s invaluable to me, especially as Brand New Box has grown and the range and number of our clients we serve has grown.
Plus it’s self-archiving! I don’t have to worry about file formats, or disk space storage, or anything. Paper is a truly excellent technology.
Some notes on format
I love the cheap ubiquity of a composition book. It doesn’t feel precious. There’s no pressure to make every page count with some beautiful drawing or incredible idea. They’re cheap too! Unlined ones are increasingly harder to find, though and I’ve ended buying them in bulk every couple of years. The sketchbook should be workman-like; it’s not a fussy tool for self expression, it’s a daily tool.
For a few years I had a side hustle with Erika taking discarded library books and stitching blank pages into them (we called it The Novel Novel). The ones we sold were really nicely constructed - great papper, hand-stitched. I used our first prototypes as my daily sketchbooks. But I kind of wish I hadn’t, because they interrupt a 23-year run of composition books. But it was fun to carry them around and talk about what we were making!
In it for the long haul
I date and label every sketchbook when it’s finished. I go through about one every two months these days, and I’ve been using the same label template all along. I chose to date them in Georgia because I was committed to this for the long run, and I knew the Georgia font would be around on my computers for decades. I do kind of wish I had learned about big-endian dating sooner, though. But alea iacta est and everything.
Why do I keep them all? I really don’t know. But they’re fun to make and fun to look back at… even if the tower is getting a little unwieldy.
Dracula Daily on tour
A while back I asked the Dracula list subscribers: should I do some in-person events? Well, it’s happening. I just posted about this on the main Dracula Daily list, and made a new Events page on draculadaily.com for this. But this is VERY fun to announce. A book tour!
Will anybody actually show up to these events? No idea. Will it be a fun experience? Definitely.
Local Crush
Today marks the launch of a very IRL project that we’ve had in the works for months: Local Crush.
You know those pressed penny machines that you find in tourist traps, where you put in 51 cents, crank a big handle, and get a stamped, elongated penny back?
We made one.
Local Crush is a migratory souvenir penny press in downtown Lawrence, Kansas - that celebrates some of our favorite downtown businesses. If you don’t know Lawrence, it’s a hip little town just west of Kansas City - famous for its music scene, the university, and its thriving original downtown. (We love it so much we relocated our software company here!)
Each month, the penny press will move to a new location in downtown Lawrence. You can visit it and collect a souvenir penny that features the host store. We’ll move the press each month for a total of 12 locations, so you can collect 12 custom penny designs over the course of a year. Plus, we’re giving all the quarters to local charities. That’s:
- 12 locations
- 12 souvenir pennies
- all showcasing independent businesses in our town
- and all the 🪙🪙🪙🪙🪙s go to local nonprofits.
In August we’re at Mass Street Soda - a delightful bottle shop that only sells individual bottles of soda (and some candy). You can find hundreds of root beers, sarsaparillas, suspicious “fruit” flavors, and also that weird cola you had once on a road trip and ever since you’ve wondered if it even still exists. It’s always full of kids shopping for something new, and there’s even a novelty section where you are explicitly warned ‘These are Legit Gross: Buy it for the Label Not the Taste.’ This warning is true, by the way, and should be flaunted at your own risk. We recently tried Corn, Dirt, and Ranch Dressing flavored sodas, and they were all truly disgusting.
So anyway: find the press there and get your souvenir penny with the limited-time-only design for Mass Street Soda! And this month, every quarter you put into the machine is going to O’Connell Children’s Shelter.
Next month: it’s headed somewhere else!
Is this going to make us any money? Definitely not. Is it a fun reason to buy a penny press? Definitely yes.
If you’re in Lawrence, come find the press at Mass Street Soda. If you’re not… come visit! Either way, you can see more about the project and follow along at localcrush.club.
Detroit
We’re so back. Work travel is bouncing back in 2023! In May I went to Detroit for a few days with Brand New Box colleagues to kick off a new project and get some face time with a new client. They’re really interesting and I hope I can write more about them in the future, although the project is NDA’d to death right now. But it was great to meet them and learn about their business. They’ve got a very unique company culture that the founder has built, and I hope we get to work together a lot more.
In the actual travel notes, I’ve never been outside the Detroit airport before, so it was fun to see downtown a bit, visit the Detroit Institute of Art where they’ve got a Tilman Riemenschneider. That place has an incredible collection. I didn’t know what a top-tier museum it is! The American paintings were really cool, and there’s a can’t miss big mural by Diego Rivera, something I didn’t think I had much interest in until I saw it. Of course my fave was a small display on stone carving techniques, including some unfinished carvings.
Fun for me to go down to the riverfront and look across the river at Windsor, Canada. I’ve never been to Canada (still haven’t) and this was the closest so far. One day, you Canucks.
We explored as much of the Guardian Building as we could, a very neat art-deco ish building.
Then the bulk of the trip was out in a very nice bedroom community, which reminded me a lot of a smaller, weller-heeled Lawrence. But even out there, it’s clear the influence of the auto industry is ever-present. I’ve never really been to such an ‘industry town’, unless you count LA or SF. Interesting to think about how much a national industry can shape a city.
Dracula Daily Preorders
So! This week I launched a preorder campaign for Dracula Daily - the print edition of the newsletter, with commentary from the internet. I announced about it on the Studio Kirkland newsletter and the main Dracula list. It went… really well.
To sweeten the pot for preorders, I made a little microsite at draculadaily.com and offered some preorder goodies. These aren’t kickstarter rewards or anything - just some thank-you merch I wanted to make.
It went really well! More than 2000 people pre-ordered the book so far and sent me their info. I assume there are even more that didn’t fill out my little form, plus I only can send the goodies to people in the US. So I’m optimistic that a lot of people found it.
The crazy thing is the bestseller flags! It’s not like a real bestseller list, but for a few hours it was #34 on amazon overall, and earned little flags on other selling platforms too.
That’s NUTS to me!